Harvey Balls are round ideograms used for visual communication of qualitative information. They are commonly used in comparison tables to indicate the degree to which a particular item meets a particular criterion.
For example, in a comparison of products, information such as price or weight can be conveyed numerically, and information such as the existence or lack of a feature can be conveyed with a check mark; however, information such as "quality" or "safety" or "taste" is often difficult to summarize in a manner allowing easy comparison---thus, Harvey Balls are used.
In addition to their use in qualitative comparison, Harvey Balls are also commonly used in Project Management for project tracking; in Lean Manufacturing for VSM and Continuous Improvement tracking; and in BPM software for visualisation.[1]
Harvey Poppel is generally credited with inventing Harvey Balls in the 1970s while working at Booz Allen Hamilton as a consultant.[2][3] This is why Harvey Balls are also sometimes referred to as Booz Balls.
Mr. Poppel's specialty was office worker productivity. He did a great deal of productivity work using clocks that pinged every 6 minutes so office personnel could note what they were doing throughout the day. Although Harvey Poppel is sometimes credited with the invention of voicemail, this is not the case.[4]
Harvey Balls have nothing to do with Harvey Ball, the inventor of the smiley face.
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A common implementation of Harvey Balls is via a Harvey Balls Font. This is typically implemented such that the numbers 0-9 map to a particular Harvey Ball. Incorporating the Harvey Ball into a document then becomes a matter of selecting the number which corresponds to the desired Harvey Ball and setting the font to Harvey Ball. The three primary benefits of this approach are 1) that the Harvey Balls are of uniform appearance; 2) the Harvey Balls can be manipulated like any other font (e.g. color, size, underline) and 3) that Harvey Balls can be made variable in a spreadsheet. The main drawback of this approach is that the font either needs to be embedded in the document or all the viewers of the document must have the font installed.
The use of SVG to render Harvey Balls allows them to be easily used in web browsers and applications that support the XML vector graphics format. The benefit is that no special font is required and the Harvey Balls can be displayed using an open format. The main drawback is that SVG is not universally supported and the SVG version of Harvey Balls are not as easy to work with in common office applications such as Powerpoint.
Microsoft Excel 2007 introduced the functionality to render Harvey Balls through the Conditional Formatting function.
The use of Unicode to render Harvey Balls depends on whether a font with these characters is installed; the Unicode Harvey Balls are more difficult to work with in presentation software such as Powerpoint and are not rendered uniformly.
The Unicode set of related symbols includes:
| Symbol | Unicode Codepoint (Hex) | Name |
|---|---|---|
| ○ | U+25CB | Large Circle |
| ● | U+25CF | Black Circle |
| ◐ | U+25D0 | Circle with left half black |
| ◑ | U+25D1 | Circle with right half black |
| ◒ | U+25D2 | Circle with lower half black |
| ◓ | U+25D3 | Circle with upper half black |
| ◔ | U+25D4 | Circle with upper right quadrant black |
| ◕ | U+25D5 | Circle with all but upper left quadrant black |
Consumer Reports is well known for using a modified type of Harvey Ball in product ratings and has even incorporated one into their logo.[5]
IBM uses a modified version in their Lotus Notes product as recipient icons to show whether the recipient of a piece of mail is the sole recipient, a copied recipient, etc.[6]
Other alternative uses of the Harvey Ball symbols include[7]:
| Symbol | Uses |
|---|---|
| ○ | Astronomy: (Full Moon) |
| ● | Astronomy: (New Moon) |
| ◐ | Astronomy: (First Quarter Moon) |
| ◑ | Astronomy: (Last Quarter Moon), Electronics: (On/Off Switch, Television Contrast) |
| ◒ | Cartography: (Spring or Well), Meteorology: (Partly overcast) |
| ◓ | |
| ◔ | Meteorology: (Almost clear sky or Somewhat overcast) |
| ◕ | Meteorology: (Broken Clouds)[8] |